Yeah, but at least Tactics Advance had some balance in the gameplay. Not only that, but its "repetitive battles" were still less repetitive than Disgaea's. And its "inferior job system" was far less inferior than Disgaea's. Disagea was Make All Mages Or You Are Wasting Your Time: The Game.

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"You know, you're pretty cool too, Arvis. You like good music, good games, and good tennis." - Divingfalcons

Man, all this FFTA bashing is making me sad. I really enjoyed that game, law system and all.

I realize I may be shunned for saying this, but there are elements of FFTA I enjoyed more than FFT. For instance, the length of the game felt more appropriate for a SRPG, and the difficulty of FFTA was a lot more balanced than OG starts-off-normal-then-has-impossible-to-win-random-battles-followed-by-being-absurdly-easy-as-soon-as-Cid-joins FFT

I think there's a lot to like in FFTA, though I know it's an unpopular opinion I've gotten flak for before.

I like its colourful world and artstyle compared to FFT. I think the camera and speed of battles in FFT and just atrocious compared to FFTA. I don't think the characters are amazingly indepth, but if we are comparing it to DIsgea, I'd take them any day, because at least they aren't one note anime tropes on steroids.

It wasn't overly moody or serious, it was light-hearted most of the time. Which can be a breath of fresh air sometimes, compared to the bleak solemness of FFT.

Soul Nomad was a fun game. It's also one of those games where I vastly preferred the English dub's portrayal of Gig (the game's primary anti-hero) over the Japanese original. When I played it, I found Gig very amusing because he exemplified the pungent and often acidic snark of several prominent members on the forums back then.

And I also think the visual novel Disgaea: Infinite is a solid way to get the Disgaea experience without the grindy SRPG, but some knowledge about the world and characters is needed to get the most out of it. It is madcap fun, though.

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"Golly, why can't I act right outside of a baseball game?" -Peppermint Patty

Yeah, out of the SNES FFs V is the one I feel BD resembles the most, and its also the one I consider the most replayable. I'd say IV and VI were more landmark for the series, but V is the one I go to to just play and enjoy. In the latter half of BD I just turned encounters off and it was really enjoyable for me to just figure out how to beat the increasingly difficult boss encounters. I would've preferred more visual variety of course, but that's not the main reason I enjoy games like it. Still, it gets points docked for that so I'd still replay FFV over it.

I still don't quite understand why people act like the latter half of BD ruined the game though- even almost all of those boss encounters are optional, the reward you get for beating them is some extra backstory that gives you a more complete picture of what happened.

Also I've never played I Am Setsuna so I can't really vote on this one.

As for Disgaea vs FFTA...I'll vote Disgaea, because insert complaint about the stupid law system in FFTA here. The only good thing that came out of it were those kickass Judge designs FF12 had.

Its more about how the game's plot is literally built around that stupid twist. A lot of things that you go through between Chapter 1~4 straight up get invalidated by the fact that you get a do-over, while a lot of time during those chapters is spent hanging Chekhov's Gun instead of building more into what they already had (the murder mystery is a big example as you completely fail it the first time and then bumble your way through the second before shutting down Ms. "Stream of Consciousness" on the third lap, but also the Chapter where its your party that dies instead of their SOs because it spends the majority of it telling the player to stop here because everybody can get a good end). The fact that for all of the implications of dimension hopping implies, they really don't do anything meaningful with it beyond lighting off all those Guns left hanging around (basically re: my complaint about Stein's;Gate and how the premise is spent focusing on Okabe's monkey paw antics followed by his efforts to call Mulligan on the whole thing, rather than exploring the premise beyond its influence on creepy otaku crap/Okabe's harem).

And on your FFTA note, it also gave us the Vera. Shame about the rest of it.